Online IPA keyboards

Tomasz P. Szynalski, an English-Polish translator, has created TypeIt, a useful website for typing phonetic transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Text can be entered in a range of fonts and with special characters, marks and glyphs from other languages.

TypeIt has been around for several years. I prefer the SIL-IPA keyboard and the Macintosh Character Palette, and even PopChar, but I’ve no doubt it can come in handy, especially for anyone who only needs to access IPA characters every once in a while.

Should your /ɪn’dɪːd/ be /ɪn’diːd/ ? (And I’m pretty sure the ! shouldn’t be inside the transcription unless there’s a new fad in Ireland for ending every sentence with an alveolar click.) :-)

I’ve always been vaguely aware of the existence of online IPA keyboards but never really looked into them, relying instead on tools such as offline Unicode maps. There’s also an online tool I use to identify unfamiliar characters in website text. But I can see how TypeIt could be useful when writing comments on linguistic blogs and so forth.

I wouldn’t bother with the English-only page, though, because it’s obviously based on only one or two standard dialects of English. For example, in Australia it’s better to use /ʉ/ rather than /u/. Do you run into any similar limitations when transcribing Irish English from the English IPA page on TypeIt?

Dragon: The prompt is a mixed blessing. On rare occasions it might be of use to people who didn’t intend leaving the page, but I think most of the time it’s more likely to interfere with their expectations. Gmail does something similar sometimes, but then it also saves as you go along.

Thanks for the corrections; I’ve fixed them. The exclamation mark was an ill-advised afterthought! Regarding Irish English, one sound missing from the basic English keypad is /ʔ/, which sometimes occurs at the end of words like wha’ (i.e., what).

[…] blog post from Stan Carey, this one linking to no less (uh, fewer?) than four websites that allow you to easily type and display IPA characters. I’ve put all the stuff I got from Stan first to get it out of the way. Seriously, you should […]

I am the author of TypeIt. I’d just like to report that the annoying “Are you sure?” prompt is no longer displayed when you exit TypeIt. Instead, TypeIt will now attempt to save the stuff you typed in your browser so that it’s restored when you go back to TypeIt.